GRE Verbal -Can someone point me to a certain website/forum?

[aquiles]

Hello. I've been studying for the GRE for literally months on end (every day for hours since the beginning of March) and was feeling pretty confident about it until I did some more reading online about ETS's choice of words for the verbal section.

I've been an avid reader all my life, I studied Barron's List of words, Kaplan's List, Princeton Review's, etc. I'm not looking for an easy way out. To put it simply, I have no respect for ETS and have read that what they choose to put on the GRE verbal section are words so intentionally esoteric that they don't think you would have stumbled across them no matter how much you read in general. I've read horror stories stating that it's entirely possible to take the GRE and encounter words that didn't appear on any of the lists compiled by test-prep companies and I wouldn't put it past ETS to do this on purpose (it sounds like a sound business plan, though that makes it more of a "jump-through-these-arbitrary-hoops-whilst-I-laugh-maniacally" game than a test of one's verbal abilities)

However, I remember reading somewhere on this forum about a website where students talk about what words have appeared on the GRE in a given month and some people have stated that the GRE loves to recycle its list of words along the course of that month - trouble is, I cannot find that post again using the forum's search function and I didn't save it when I first read it. I'm taking the GRE in the second half of August and was wondering if anyone could point me towards whatever website or forum it is where students talk about what words and patterns of words have appeared most recently on the GRE verbal section.

Thanks for any help - I'd love to know what pool of words I could study that the GRE would actually test me on and where I could find that. I reiterate that I have no desire to be lazy, but I don't like the idea that I might flub the GRE simply because ETS arbitrarily decide to throw a lot of words on my test that only a 4th year aeronautical engineer would know.

[InUtero1994]

Yeah.. i been looking for that site and can't find anything...

[Minnesotan]

I think you're worrying over nothing. The words I saw on my GRE are pretty common in the more difficult works I study in grad school (in English -- our discipline are more inclined to use big words than engineers or scientists).

ETS gets a bad rap from the lazy or stupid folks who fail their tests. As is always said in the assessment game, "It aint perfect, but it's all we got." I think the GRE does a fine job of doing what it's supposed to do on the verbal, which is see what kind of vocabulary and reading comprehension you've cultivated over the first 16 years of study.

[belowthree]

in English -- our discipline are more inclined to use big words than engineers or scientists

I think the only difference is the people in your field expect the rest of us to know what your big words mean. We use big words also, but we're comfortable with the fact that we made them up yesterday and so we don't really expect people to know what we're saying.

[Minnesotan]

Well, we expect native English speakers to know the bulk of the words that make up their first language, yeah. Maybe that's too much to ask.

[aquiles]

Thanks for all the replies!

Oh, and for the record: I did marvelously and my worries were completely unfounded, just as Minnesotan said. Just studying lists of Vocab from a few test prep companies is indeed all that's really necessary.